Blinded by your Love
by Audrey
Summary: How far will Spike go for Buffy? Spike gets the chip taken out of his head but pays a heavy fee: his sight. Carnage. Time travel. Love. PG13 for extreme/graphic violence.


**Blinded by your Love**

*****

_Who would sell their soul for love?_

_Or waste one tear on compromise?_

_Should be easy enough  
To know a heartache in disguise_

*****

[song: "that kind of love"- alison krauss, played during "entropy"  
concept: thanks to KJS. you're my carnage muse.  
time of fic: immediately post-"entropy"]

*

Spike briefly wondered why he was there. It stunk, like vinegar or pickled organs, and the florescent light was hurting his eyes. The ceiling of the room he was in looked like it was going to fall on him any moment. Behind him, the "doctor" blew his nose on his sleeve and stuck the probe further on into the vampire's head. 

"Oops."  
  
Spike snarled a warning.   
He gritted his teeth, reminded himself of the night's earlier disgraces to distract himself from the cold metal objects poking about in his brain.  
_  
he was just ... there.  
  
_Bloody bints._  
  
like mount everest?  
  
_The both of them. 

At that moment, he felt saturated, soaking with alcohol and Anya's perfume and the heavy hatred of Xander's sweat. Lying on that couch-cum-operating table, he felt the embodiment of a being discarded. Unwanted.   
  
_that, that thing..._

See, none of it had hurt as much as the fact that she hadn't claimed him. The stake two inches away from a pile of dust hadn't phased him, nor had Xander's insults. Anya's clear admittance that she'd used him stung, but only because it echoed someone else's.

_Xander..._

Why had Buffy called out _his_ name? Why that wanker, why hadn't she said, "Spike", why hadn't she seen how much it pained him to be used as just another cold body, just another toy? Instead, she'd followed that sad overgrown excuse for a sidekick.  
  
Spike felt only one emotion, and that was cold, cutting rage. And there was only one target: Xander. He growled in anticipation. When he got this chip out, that bugger was doomed, he was going to cr- 

"AAAAAARRRGH!" 

The chip pulled its remaining roots from swollen nerves and clattered to the floor.  
Spike tightened his grip around the terrified doctor's neck.  
And everything was very, very dark.

  
*  
  
"What'd you do to me?!"  
"I'm sorry!"  
"What did you DO?!"  
"I...I don't know....I took out the chip, like you asked."  
Spike bared his fangs. "I know that. But why can't I see?"  
"You can't see?" Spike could feel the wind of the quack waving his hand in front of his face.  
"Uh...I suppose...It's a possibility that I might've damaged something while I was in there-- the chip was pretty deeply rooted in your nervous system and..." Mumblemumblemumble.  
"WHAT?" roared Spike.  
"...I had to do some...trimming."  
"You CUT my BLOODY BRAIN up?" The vampire slammed the man violently against the wall. "You've made me bloody BLIND!"  
"...uh...well, to put it simply...yes."  
Spike dug his fingers into the quack's windpipe, choking him. The man clawed uselessly at the vampire's hands, to no avail. Spike smiled. He missed this. "Give me one good reason why I should let your useless lump of lard live."  
Sputtering and hissing.   
Rolling his blind eyes, Spike released the man's throat.  
"Killing me won't get your sight back!"  
Spike put his hand back on the man's neck.   
"B-because I have something you want!"  
The blonde vampire snorted. "What do you have that I could possibly want?"  
The quack stumbled over to a nearby chest, popped it open with a quick incantation and pulled out a tiny bronze dagger. He placed it Spike's waiting hand. "It- It's a portal opener. I just got it today. Haven't had time to try it." He quailed at the derisive sneer on Spike's face. "You can travel through time!" he blurted. "Gives you two hours!"  
Spike stopped sneering. "You wouldn't give this to me if it really worked."  
The man shrugged. "What'm I gonna do with two hours? Besides...that portal stuff..."  
Spike resumed sneering. "Haven't got the stones, eh?" He didn't need to see the man nodding to know he was right. "Alright doc, I'll take your word for it," he said, pocketing the dagger. He raised his eyebrows. "If I get brought back 2 hours though... won't I just end up back here for the chip n' get stuck in a loop?"  
The quack shook his head quickly. "No, I mean, theoretically no. That's not what it does. It... it brings you back two hours and replaces that self with your current one. So you'll avoid all problems. You won't have to deal with m-meeting yourself and you get to keep the chip out of your head, and you remember everything."  
"And stay blind."  
The man's voice was quieter. "And stay blind." He swallowed. "You uh, you cut yourself on the hand with it to trigger yourself back. Blood sacrifice or something like that. And it's reusable. Brings you to back to the same point in time every time you cut." He tapped his feet nervously, looking hopefully up into Spike's blank blue eyes.  
Spike pulled the dagger out of his pocket and rolled it around in his hands. "Well," he said. "What kind of man would I be if I didn't take a chance with a new toy, hmm?" 

He cut.

*

"Where do you get off judging me?!"  
"When this is your solution to our problems. I hurt you, and you hurt me back? Very mature."

And suddenly he was back again, only less drunk, blind, and hungrier.   
He heard the voices around him and marveled at how the emotion was so much more tangible when he couldn't see a thing. They dangled like spiderwebs in front of him.  
  
"No, the mature solution is for you to spend your whole life telling stupid, pointless jokes, so that no one will notice that you are just a scared, insecure little boy!"  
"I'm not joking now. You let that evil, soulless thing touch you." Accusation flared towards him. "You wanted me to feel something? Congratulations, it worked. I look at you ... and I feel sick. 'Cause you had sex with that."  
  
It was all suddenly very funny to him.  
They stopped speaking at the sound of his laughter and he was quite sure they were staring at him. He was acutely aware of Buffy's heartbeat, could hear it ringing in his ears. He could trace each of them by their scents. 

"It's good enough for Buffy," he said, louder than he had the first time, relishing the moment. 

He couldn't see their shock, but he could taste it. The conversation continued and Spike no longer felt the sting of insults, only a strange aura of boredom, a zen-like and heavy feeling of _knowing. _Nothing mattered when he knew what was coming. When everyone finally left, he followed Xander's heavy footsteps and the stench of his sweat back to the boy's apartment and spent the night having fun with kitchen knives to celebrate the loss of his chip. He had just discovered the drawer of shish kebob skewers when the police showed up. Being blind left him with no chance at a showdown; he'd be knocked unconscious and dragged into sunlight faster than he could say "revenge". Giving the steel rod in Xander's back a final twist, he pulled the dagger out of his pocket and slit his hand down the middle in a fit of glee.

*   
  
" 'S good enough for Buffy, here, isn't it?"

He said his lines like the proper actor, adding poetic touches here and there that threw them only slightly off before they recited the words he'd heard before as if they were programmed into them. The air of a naughty child caught doing naughty things had already melted off of him until now he wore only the smug idea of invincibility about him. It was a bit like being a young and unbeaten vampire. It was a bit like bagging his first slayer. 

He followed Anya, a bit clumsily, into the store and, when she heard him bumping noisily into a shelf, pushed her up against a wall and tried to kiss her again because he knew Buffy would not let him. He couldn't see the disgust on her face, but he could feel her knee push violently into his groin. This irritated him, so he ripped her throat out. Killing the homeless man who moaned in the alley outside only piqued his appetite so he wandered into the street and listened until he heard Xander's heavy footsteps again, and followed the echo until he bumped straight into him. 

"What the fuck are you doing, Spike?"  
Spike laughed and laughed.  
"You know what?"   
Spike imagined a ballooned caricature of Xander's red face and kept laughing.   
"I've had enough of this. This is enough. No Buffy to save your pathetic ass now... You're dust, buddy."   
His messy attempts were obvious even to a blind vampire. Vampire senses and vampire reflexes, undampered by the chip, sprung half through instinct and half through experience into fierce action. The stake had only been raised when Spike took Xander's arm and broke it in two. A deft kick and he was on the ground. In no artful manner, Spike kicked him. He kicked him while he was down. He kicked him until the ground ran red with blood. He kicked him until he was dead. 

The sizzling that tickled the back of his neck was the first pull out of his bloodlust. He realized that the sun would always win. In a rage he stabbed the dagger straight into the heart of his palm.

*

"So you go out and bang the first body you can find? Dead or alive?"

Spike snarled and sank his teeth into Xander's neck, pulling the jugular out and drinking heavily. He could only take so much of the thick and unrefined blood before he shoved the body away from him, knocking over Buffy. He closed his fingers around a handful of Anya's hair and pulled maliciously back and marveled just how much a vengeance demon's blood could taste human. He saw Buffy rise to her feet from over Anya's shoulder. He pricked a finger with the dagger.

* 

He realized that he could have as much blood as he wanted now, and there was no need rushing. What he wanted was her. He wanted Buffy.   
He tried apologizing, lowering his eyes to look ashamed and hide the blind blankness in them. He tried being self-defacing. He even tried offering ways to prove himself. But they just called him pathetic. Buffy would say nothing but he could feel the anger still radiating off of her. Xander would not shut up. 

In the dim light outside the Magic Shop, he sat alone and thought for a long while.

*

This time he waited. He hid in sewers. He found himself a cane. It wasn't hard retracing the footsteps back to the Summers' house- he knew them all too well. Wild horses couldn't drag him away from that house, could a little bit of darkness? When he caught Buffy alone he told her he loved her more than anything he'd ever known in two lives. He told her he'd put her before himself without thinking. He told her he felt her pain stronger than he felt his own. Didn't that make him human? A good human? Wasn't that good enough for her? 

He might love her. He might feel for her. It didn't make him human. Who else? she asked him. 

This presented a problem for Spike. 

On the other side of Sunnydale, Xander found a ticking bomb in his pantry. 

*

The Niblet! he shouted after her the next time. I risked my life for her, didn't I?  
She's just an extension of me to you, she said to him. And she was right.  
Besides, she said.   
Being good isn't about having empathy for those you like and who like you. It's showing humanity towards those you hate, too.

Who did Spike hate?  
Oh, how long the list.

*

He hid from her a little while. He killed with discretion and inconspicuously. Nobody would think William the Bloody the perpetrator of those acts-- too mundane for his flashy style. There was a clumsiness in the carnage added by blindness that the old Spike never would have allowed. After the first few days without him, she started appearing at his lair and walking away dejectedly when he wasn't there. One day he came back from hunting to find her sitting on the foot of his bed crying.

They made love like they used to, more passionately perhaps, but in the morning she put her clothes on and told him she was still using him. She told him she had just had a weak moment. She left. 

When the tears and the anger stopped, he picked off a couple of drunk teenagers at a high school party and buried the tip of the dagger into the space between his thumb and forefinger. 

*

He was on his way to doing something great when he got hit by a car and broke both his legs. "What're you, blind _and_ stupid?" asked the driver. Spike sighed and added another crimson line to the dozens of scars sprinkling his left hand.

*

He let her cry longer, until she fell asleep on his couch. He sat down beside her and listened to her sleep.

Xander opened his bathroom door that night and knew first-hand the experience of having one's skin burned off by a vat of acid falling on one's head. 

Meanwhile, she woke next to him and tried to kiss him, but he stopped her and asked if she'd even looked into his eyes. She guiltily said no, and he told her he was blind and he could tell by the way her heartbeat sped up but the blood slowed down that there was real pity for him within her. There was perhaps...guilt. 

She didn't leave in the morning with self-loathing, but a quiet decision. "It'd never work. My friends...Dawn...Xander... I'm a Slayer and you're still a Vampire. Good bye."

He would not let himself be hurt. He thoughtfully gnawed on an old lady who'd been walking her dog and made up a plan.

*

Unfinished business.   
He hopped a train to LA, called ahead of time to let them know a disabled gentleman from England was arriving via cab and would need special help onto the train and to his seat.   
He managed to do away with the cabbie, the conductor, and his entire cabin without any special help.  
It tasted so, so good.

The second cab took him from the train station to a cheap SRO motel in a notoriously paranormal corner of South Central Los Angeles. The LAPD was alerted of several deaths in the area that involved a railroad spike being rammed through the victim's skull.

Might as well put up a huge fucking sign announcing he was here for her. 

She showed up, alright, just as he knew she would. Even in his private blindness he heard her mumbling to her doll and herself as she opened the door.   
"Druscilla, love, did you get the present I left you?"  
Three children blindfolded and tied to a banister, fingers unwillingly pointed at the door to his room.   
She crossed the room in a few quick steps and laid on top of him on the bed. She licked her lips, then his. He tasted blood. "I'll take that as a yes."   
"Creative puppy," she said. "Good puppy. Missed you, like the rain, after the summer." Her fingers traced the scar on the back of his head. "Mommy loves the puppy."  
And love him she did, long and well.   
  
Afterwards, as she lay vibrating like a sunning cat beside him, he said, "If only I could-"  
She covered his mouth with her hand. "Shh! Can't see, can't see. We know!" She tickled his eyelids with her fingertips. "Ms. Edith and I will take care of you, we will."   
Spike jerked her towards him tightly and smiled to hear her squeal. He kissed her, hard, on the lips, nipping a bit like he knew she always liked. "Dru, pet?"  
"Mmm, yesss," she said, rubbing her head against his chest.  
  
"I'm onto bigger and better things."  
  
He pressed the blade into his palm. 

*

"It's good enough for Buffy."  
"Shut up and leave her out of- "  
He never got tired of that look on Xander's face.  
"Buffy?"  
"Xander..."  
"I don't want to know this."

Spike then stumbled into oblivion for a few weeks.  
Within those weeks, a series of tragic incidents occurred.  
First a letter appeared on Buffy's doorstep that enclosed the death and final will of Rupert Giles. Then the gas in the Summers house mysteriously sprung a leak while Tara and Willow were asleep. Tara did not survive, but Willow did, if you counted living from magic fix to magic fix surviving. Without her soulmate, the witch fell into a perpetual and demented state of artificial bliss, interspersed only by brief moments of bitter sobriety. Anya simply disappeared. Halfrek swore she sensed a murder, but nobody else believed her. Mostly people thought that the whole situation with Xander had led her to decide to start a new life in a new city, perhaps a new dimension. 

Predictably, Dawn started cracking. Buffy did her best to try to keep her sane without letting on that she, too, was on the verge of a breakdown. They both started leaning more and more on Xander. Within a few days everyone involved realized that he wasn't enough, not a strong enough shoulder. His grief made him wretched, and subconsciously, Buffy started resenting him purely because she needed more. 

And she kept showing up to Spike's empty lair to cry.

On the 7th day of the last week, Spike slept on in his hideaway, blind eyes shut, lips curved in a smile.

In the late evening Buffy awoke with a leather duster tucked gently underneath her chin. There was no note but in the air was the gritty smell of freshly-consumed blood. She didn't know enough to taste the difference between pig's blood and human.

That same night Xander heard the doorbell ring and opened the door. The three figures that greeted his eyes were familiar, despised, and a little bit pathetic. They would've been more pathetic if Warren hadn't been carrying a gun.   
"Where's the Slayer." Warren's growl was more a demand than a question.  
Xander's eyes narrowed. "Shouldn't you folks be at a Trekkie convention?"  
"There's a Trekkie conventi-?"  
"Shut up Andrew." Warren jabbed the gun threateningly at Xander's face. "Don't mess around with us. You left us a note saying the Slayer would be here. A "showdown." We came prepared. Now where is she?"  
Xander shook his head. "I don't know what you mean."  
Jonathan tugged nervously at Warren's shirt. "See? I told you it was a prank. Let's get out of here man. Right Andrew? Andrew?"  
Andrew was lying face down on Xander's carpet with a shortsword in his back. In a few seconds, so was Jonathan. And before Warren had much time to think, he looked down to see a long blade protruding from his chest, his wrist broken, and Spike staring blankly in his direction with a smirk on his face. And the gun in his hand. "Bye-bye, robot-boy." Thump.  
Xander recoiled, snarling. "Spike?!"   
Spike tossed the gun from hand to hand, walking towards Xander with something like glee in his smile.   
"Put down the fucking gun, Spike."  
Spike sniffed at the air. "Mmm. Fear." He crinkled his nose playfully. "Makes me all rumbly inside."  
"What's wrong with your eyes?"  
Spike shrugged. Then he raised the gun and shot Xander square in the stomach.   
Of all the music in the world, that which brought most joy to Spike's ears was the sound of a dying man gurgling. It meant something vital had ruptured and now blood was bubbling up through his throat, his mouth. Oh, it was lovely. "You'll never be able to tell her, man," he chuckled madly to Xander. "You'll be dead before she even sets foot in the door."   
Spike then shot himself in the leg. He dragged himself over to Warren and closed the dead man's cold, thick fingers around the gun handle. He took the sword, laid his cheek lovingly open, and, with a deep breath, plunged it recklessly into his eye socket.   


*

Buffy found Spike half-conscious in the bloody wreckage of the apartment. She saw Xander first, but when she ran to him with a cry ripping out of her throat, she already knew he was dead. The vampire she saw second, seemingly unconscious and bleeding profusely into puddles on the floor.   
  
"Spike..."  
"Buffy, I-" 

And who would suspect him?

"-I tried, Buffy, I tried to stop them-"  
"Shhh..."  
"-too late, I got here too late- and the chip-"

Who would blame the blind man?

"-and I can't see and, god I messed up again, just like I did with Dawn and y-"  
"-It's ok, Spike, it's alright."

She cradled his blind head into her chest and rocked him. She was afraid of losing him again. She was afraid of losing anyone anymore. 

"I love you" he whispered into her skin, lips wet with blood. "I love you. Xander- I tried so hard to save him for you ... to be good. You make me good, Buffy... Please believe me."

She believed him.

_Who would sell their soul for love?_   
(end)


End file.
